July 21, 2006

25 hottest or 40 hottest - you decide

We bumped the number of "hottest" demands from 25 to 40 on the Hottest Demands Worldwide page yesterday. So it's now essentially a "Top 40" list of the latest up-to-the-minute activity in Eventful Demand.

It's an experiment to see if the increased exposure of demands encourages more people to join. It does mean the page takes a little bit longer to load, but we think it's worth it. Do you? Let us know: feedback @ eventful.com, or just post a comment to this blog post.

January 27, 2006

Free T-Shirt Offer, or, Ruby Developers Take Note: New Ruby API for EVDB

We've rolled out a new API interface for Ruby developers. Get the full scoop at api.evdb.com. Look about halfway down the page for the "Interface Libraries" section. In there you'll find a link to the EVDB:API Ruby Module.

Let us know what you think, and be sure to tell us about any apps you create!

Did I mention we'll send out a FREE Eventful t-shirt to the first three people to develop and ship an app or tool that uses our new Ruby API interface? No? Well, we will, so get coding!

January 04, 2006

Updates to Event Detail Page; New Features

We've cleaned up the layout and organization of information and links on all event detail pages. Here's a summary of what's new:

• 1. We've added a date box at the top left of every event detail page, so at a glance you can see when the event is. If the event extends more than one day, we'll show the starting date followed by a plus sign.<


• 2. The venue information section has been renamed "Where" and moved from the right of the page to the left, and placed under the "When" section.


• 3. The description for the event is now in a newly-named "What" section.


• 4. The Cost, Links, and Comments sections are pretty much as they were before. To add a link to an event, just click the little "add" link under the word "Links".


• 5. We've moved the "add to group or calendar" feature to the upper right of event detail area. The button will appear as a "+" plus sign if you've not already added the event anywhere. Otherwise it will appear as a set of "+/-" plus/minus signs, indicating you can add this event to a group or calendar, or remove from a group or calendar you've already added it to.


• 6. You can now click on the event image to see the full-size version of the image as it was originally uploaded by the event creator. The full-size image will appear in a pop-up window, so you'll need to have your browser configured to allow pop-up windows to see it.


• 7. We've moved the "Who's Going" list to a more prominent position right under the event image. If you haven't indicated you're going, the system will ask you, "Are you going?" If you click "Are you going?" the system will (assuming you're signed in) add your name to the list. Your name is always in bold. You can remove your name from the "Who's Going" list by clicking on the little "(x)" next to your name.


• 8. We've moved the tags list from the far right column into the event detail area, positioned underneath the Who's Going list.


• 9. If the event has been added to a public group or calendar, the name(s) of the groups or calendars will appear underneath the Tags list. You can click on any group or calendar names to go see those items.


• 10. We've cleaned up the set of user options in the right-hand column. You can Email this event to someone, create a similar event, or, and this is a new feature -- report a problem with this event. Specifically, you can indicate that you believe this event is a duplicate of some other event, or contains incorrect information, is abusing EVDB's Terms of Use, contains mature content, is SPAM, or has some other problem. There's also space to leave a note.

We've also cleaned up and redesigned the "Owner Tools" section of the event details page. This section appears if you are signed in and the system realizes you're the creator of the event you're viewing. The Owner Tools section provides links to edit the event, add a sub-event to this event, withdraw this event, or submit it to other websites using our universal auto-submit feature blogged about recently here. We list the submission status of each site; by default, everything says "not submitted".

We hope the new layout makes it easier to read and quickly get the information you need. Let us know if there's anything you'd like to see added to the event detail pages, thanks!

December 30, 2005

Eventful Bot - Find Events via AOL Instant Messenger

This has been cooking around for a couple weeks here at EVDB -- Danny Markham's Eventful Bot, a delightful interface to Eventful using AOL Instant Messenger.

All you need to do is add "eventfulbot" as an AIM buddy, and then chat with her! Start by saying "Hello", and if you need help, just say "Help".

December 23, 2005

More News on Auto-Submit, and a Call To Action on SES

We've re-enabled support for Upcoming.org on our Auto-Submit feature. So if you want to create an event on Eventful.com and have it automatically posted to Upcoming.org as well, you can now do so again -- provided you have an Upcoming.org account.

We've implemented a de-duping capability using the Upcoming API -- so if you try to post an event on Upcoming and specify a venue that already exists on Upcoming, we do our best to use the Upcoming venue as opposed to create what would wind up being a copy of the venue. We've also implemented support for Upcoming's newly-released token-based authentication.

I'd like to thank everyone on the Upcoming team for the super responsiveness, cooperation, and overall willingness to work with us to make this happen. I hope we can continue to work together in achieve further levels of integration in 2006.

Along those lines, some thoughts, in the form of an open letter to all the companies in the emerging "event" space on the web:

One thing that's come out of this whole Auto-Submit experience is the clear need for an independent, web-wide standard way of publishing event data that is highly portable, highly detailed, and available to any aggregator that wants it. This goes beyond EVDB, or Upcoming, or Zvents, or any other company. The web still needs a totally open, portable way of letting any individual or organization announce their events to the world, enabling search engines and aggregators to help people find these events more readily.

We see two parts to the problem – notification, and choice of data container format.

In the blog world, we've seen blog software makers all cooperating on a ping API standard, meaning that whenever anyone posts a new article on their blog, it gets announced to ping servers automatically, enabling Technorati-style aggregator/search services to flourish, and, in turn, enabling blog discoverability to flourish.

This is what events need on the web. A way for event discovery to flourish through a widely adopted notification standard.

I'd like to see Upcoming, along with us, Zvents, and everyone else, publish public events to one or more ping servers that know how to deal with events, and let any other person or service subscribe to those ping servers.

The second part of the problem is an event data container format. The good ol' iCalendar format (RFC 2445) is one possible answer to this. This is the format that most calendaring apps use to externalize event data. But iCalendar has some drawbacks for public events; most notably, it has only minimal ability to represent location information. Through our participation in the CalConnect group, we're trying to eliminate these shortcomings. There are numerous other possibilities for event container formats, from microformats embedded in HTML documents, to RSS / ATOM, to brand-new XML formats.

We think the solution to the container format problem is to require that the ping message contain information about the format(s) of the available event data. This would allow the ping mechanism to continue to be used as event container formats evolve. In the interests of event discovery, having ping servers embrace multiple formats -- and letting the marketplace over time decide which it wants to use and which it doesn't -- is the best bet.

For a while the EVDB team has been kicking around an idea called SES, or Simple Event Sharing, which would be essentially something along the lines of what's described above. We already have the beginnings of a ping server. But there's lots more to do, and no one company is going to do (or own) it all. For all of this to work it needs to be open and something all the vendors agree to support.

Wanna work with us on this? I think it'd be a great project for us, Upcoming, Zvents, and any other events sites to achieve in 2006.

Let's do it!